How To Install ATutor on Ubuntu 16.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configuration of ATutor on your Ubuntu 16.04. For those of you who didn’t know, ATutor is an Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS) designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind. Administrators can install or update ATutor in minutes, and develop custom templates to give ATutor a new look. Educators can quickly assemble, package, and redistribute Web-based instructional content, easily retrieve and import prepackaged content, and conduct their courses online. Students learn in an adaptive learning environment.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of ATutor on a Ubuntu 16.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install ATutor on Ubuntu 16.04

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP)  server.

A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mcrypt php5-mysql php5-gd

Step 3. Installing ATutor.

The first thing to do is to go to ATutor’s download page and download the latest stable version of ATutor, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.2.1:

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/atutor/ATutor%202/ATutor-2.2.1.tar.gz?r=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atutor.ca%2Fatutor%2Fdownload.php -O ATutor-2.2.1.tar.gz

Unpack the ATutor archive to the document root directory on your server:

tar -zxvf ATutor-2.2.1.tar.gz
mv ATutor/ /var/www/html/atutor/

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/atutor/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for ATutor.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the ATutor. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for ATutor installation:

create database atutor;
grant all privileges on atutor.* to atutoruser@localhost identified by 'your_password';
flush privileges;
exit

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for ATutor.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘atutor.conf’ on your virtual server:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/atutor.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/atutor.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/atutor.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/atutor.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com
DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/atutor/"
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/atutor/>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog "/var/log/apache2/yourdomain.com-error_log"
CustomLog "/var/log/apache2/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined
</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing ATutor.

ATutor will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/ or http://your-server-ip and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed ATutor. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing ATutor (Learning Management System) on your Ubuntu 16.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official ATutor website.